SEO is an important part of digital promotion. It’s the only way of ensuring organic traffic through the Google search engine, as well as all the other search engines available today. Magento has paid a lot of attention to its SEO capabilities, and this is why it’s currently one of the most popular eCommerce platforms today, according to the February 2012 Alexa report.

Starting back in 2008, Magento was developed by a number of open source developers. It meant it started off on the right foot immediately. It had lots of customisation options and was simple to set up and install. It also paid a great deal of attention to SEO, as well as providing a range of Magento extensions to enhance it further.

Here are some of the reasons why using the Magento eCommerce solution is beneficial for SEO reasons.

1. Best Practices URLs

Your URL is more important than you think. There are a set of best practices laid down by Google in relation to URLs. Magento, by default, uses search engine friendly URLs. This enables users to customise every URL on their website.

For business owners, they can build their pages according to a specific product. In other words, they can have a product page with a simple picture of the product. Without search engine friendly URLs, the page name would be the name of the image, rather than the name set up by them.

By using custom URLs, you can build an SEO campaign around a specific product. Try this with Opencart, which doesn’t support custom URLs, and you’re at a severe disadvantage.

2. Google Sitemap

The sitemap is a way for webmasters to inform search engines about the different pages on their websites. Crawler bots used for searching websites will do their jobs faster with a sitemap in place.

In practice, this means you’ll have your website indexed faster. Any updates you make to your website will be reflected in the search engine results faster. Your customers will be better able to find specific products.

The Magento platform also has a community where you can find out more about creating a sitemap for a Magento website.

3. Top 5 Bar

The top 5 search bar, which comes with every Magento website, will better optimise traffic for specific products. In terms of SEO, the internal search bar will log the most popular products. You’re essentially pointing out to Google what your most popular products are, and they’ll respond by placing these products higher up the Google search engines.

It’s also beneficial for optimising traffic for products that haven’t gained the necessary amount of exposure. Changing the products that appear can increase the number of conversions for these products.

4. Magento Most Viewed Products

View your most recently viewed products from your dashboard. This doesn’t have a direct impact on SEO. Instead, it helps business owners understand what customers are looking at. Tailor your SEO campaign according to the results gained from your most viewed products. It’s especially useful for creating a Google AdWords campaign.

5. Magento Content Management System (CMS)

The CMS is where you’ll perform most of your SEO tasks. There are far more options for SEO customisation than other platforms. One major benefit is you can alter the original template for your theme. This provides an unrivalled number of options for you to take advantage of.

Another feature is static blocks. Static blocks are where you can take a chunk of HTML and change it. It’s a custom variable that makes setting up seasonal campaigns and special banners easy, which will have an effect on your SEO, because Google will register these changes.